A debut memoir recounting how a San Francisco–based couple became parents with the help of a surrogate mother in India.
By age 36, marketing and communications executive Arieff had suffered three painful miscarriages, one of them in the middle of her second trimester. The discovery of large uterine fibroids portended that a successful, full-term pregnancy would be almost impossible. She and her lawyer husband, Alex, looked into surrogacy options, and their research led them to the Akanksha Infertility Clinic in India. Initially Arieff made the trip there solo to undergo several weeks of IVF treatments. Two weeks later, Alex joined her and Arieff's eggs were harvested, fertilized and implanted into the couple's hired surrogate mother, Vaina. A young married mother from a rural village, Vaina spent the next nine months living at the clinic, under a doctor's care and free from the judgments of her neighbors. She planned to use the money, equal to 15 years of salaried work, to buy her husband a taxi and pay for her children's schooling. Writing in the present tense, Arieff chronicles all of the minutiae involved in their choice, including their fears, deep gratitude for and connection to Vaina for birthing their two twin girls (“no matter how far apart we are geographically, Vaina, my daughters, and I will always be connected by this sacred thread”), and the reactions of their friends and family. The author provides a smooth, compelling read that will surely interest prospective parents exploring their options for surrogacy abroad. A personal, optimistic take on a controversial subject.
Pub Date: March 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-71668-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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